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- Title
Moral Sensitivity and Desire Attachment: In What Sense are they Constituents of One’s Rational Profile?
- Authors
Koutoungos, Aristophanes
- Abstract
A quantitative interpretation is given of the (in) coherence that moral agents experience as a tension between their ordered moral judgments over n physically incompatible actions, and the competitive ordering of motivating intensities (or, desires). Then a model describing one’s tendency to reduce the experienced in-coherence is constructed. In this model, moral sensitivity ( S) and desire attachment ( e) function as primitives that motivate from opposing perspectives the reduction of incoherence. Two distinct sub-processes of this reduction are therefore initiated by ( S) and ( e) co-ordinated (more or less efficiently) by the agent’s degree of rationality ( R) characteristic of her capacity to handle such internal tensions. This process ends when a new equilibrium between what motivates and what resists (further) reduction has been reached. A macro-equilibrium is described involving ( R) constrained by weakness-of-will ( W w ). A reinterpretation of the Aristotelian characters (enkratês, akratês, etc.) and an exegesis of Hume’s ‘Calm Passions’ follow as applications.
- Subjects
JUDGMENT (Psychology); ETHICS; MOTIVATION (Psychology); SENSITIVITY (Personality trait); RESISTANCE (Philosophy)
- Publication
Acta Analytica, 2008, Vol 23, Issue 2, p125
- ISSN
0353-5150
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s12136-008-0025-1